Creating venues for poetry in support of healthy ocean communities

DARK ENERGY, DARK MATTER, AND DARKER MINDS by Tom Savage

This poem is not about the cosmos
And the dim ideas some have
Concerning a consciousness
Responsible for it all.
This poem is about the oil
(glug glug) currently spilling
Into the Gulf of Mexico
Out of a pipe
Some greedy capitalists erected
To give themselves more money
Than they already have.
Can a new expletive be invented
To encompass British Petroleum
Or BP as all the media call it?
Why does the term “bi-polar spring to mind
More or less instantaneously?
The spill, which continues as I write
Is going to force us
To find a new form of darker energy
To clean it up
Or leave many thousand turtles,
Birds, shrimp, and
Other forms of life
Coated with black
As they die, not to mention
Eleven human beings already dead. Why?
Because some greedy fools
Possibly in London
Wanted yet more money than they have
And can’t contain
The disaster they have created.
They can’t or won’t
Even accurately measure it yet.
Also, many thousands of breathing human beings
Will lose their livelihoods
From the latest, grossest
Example of upper class
Human greed and now
The very Republicans who
Killed all the regulation
That might have prevented
This calamity want
To blame Obama for it.
May they burn in a thousand Hells
Created by burning oil
For their shenanigans over many years.
Meanwhile, let’s put BP out of business
With lawsuits.
We humans are the only animals
Able to institute this re-action
So we must. No trust
Or business must be
Allowed to be too large
To shirk its responsibility
For spoiling yet another part
Of this Earth nobody owns
But everyone borrows
On a long-term loan
Without enough conditions
So that British Petroleum
Soon enough
(We hope) will come
The time for you to pay up, shut up
(shut the pipe ,if possible)
And, potentially,
To disappear.

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Tom Savage is the author of nine books of poetry, including Brainlifts (Straw Gate Books, 2008), and Political Conditions/Physical States 1994, United Artists Books. He has received two grants from the Fund For Poetry and taught workshops at The Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. His poems have appeared in the New York Times, Rattapallax, Hanging Loose, and many other magazines.